Posted by Pamela Arnsberger on Aug 10, 2017
Announcements and Reminders
 
A special welcome to Bill Witmer who is joining our club!
Come on Saturday, September 16th to the Beer Can Beach Clean-up at 9:00.
 
A Rotary membership program will be offered a week from Saturday in Pleasanton. Let Win know if you would like to go.
 
Rotary Avenues of Service is coming up October 5th at the Santa Clara Biltmore at 5:00.
 
Kate reported back from the library meeting. There will be an event where the friends of the library will encourage people to read a selected book and share it with children. She will keep us informed of future events.
Today was our meeting with the district governor, Orrin Mahoney. The area governor, Donna Maurello, also accompanied him. He worked for many years at Hewlett Packard as a mechanical engineer and served on the city council and finally as Mayor of Cupertino. He has a real commitment to international service and has been on many Rotary Service trips.
He spoke about a number of Rotary District 5170 issues and opportunities including international service, membership and fundraising.

 

He began by talking about the six magic words ”Have you ever thought about Rotary?” He said membership is important and that you maintain membership partly to keep the club fresh so that people aren’t burnt out. The Council recently approved flexibility in meetings and attendance to help boost membership; for instance clubs only have to meet twice a month. A new pilot program in Cupertino allows RotarAct members to join Rotary at a reduced rate.

He stressed that Rotary means the development of acquaintance as an opportunity for service. He gave some examples of these opportunities including Faces of Hope, a cosmetic surgery program for kids in Guatemala, wheelchair distributions, Via West camp for Developmentally Disabled children in the Santa Cruz Mountains, donating computers and medical equipment to a hospital in Chile, Polio Plus.

Our District has 54 clubs. IT runs from the East Bay down to San Juan Bautista. He said the role of the district is to inspire and support the clubs thru the use of multiple communication tools, training programs and motivating events. Mr. Mahoney stressed that supporting youth programs is a large value added activity for Rotary. We have the largest Interact District in the world with over 7000 members in our district. He also spoke about RYLA and Youth Exchange and the speech contest.

He also discussed the Rotary Foundation and the DDF funds. Half  of it is returned to the clubs based on their level of giving. In the past, global grants were matched by DDF funds but not local projects. But now the District has set up an exchange where clubs who do local projects can sell their DDF credits for 1.25 dollars to other clubs that want it for their international projects.

He closed by inviting us to save the date for the Project Fair on October 5th. John Matthews will be the speaker. In addition the International Conference will be in Toronto this year.